Shape-shifter

David Fisher’s “Dynamic Architecture”

Architects don’t usually hold elaborate press conferences to announce their new designs. But David Fisher is not a typical architect, and not only because he goes by the honorific “Dr.” Fisher, who was born in Tel Aviv fifty-nine years ago, is based in Florence, and believes that he has come up with the most innovative concept in architecture since the pyramids. He calls it “Dynamic Architecture,” and it includes a plan for an eighty-story skyscraper in which every floor rotates, not in tandem with other floors but on its own. Fisher unveiled his project the other day, in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel.

Fisher’s building looks something like the torqued towers that have been designed in recent years by established architects like Santiago Calatrava, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Kohn Pedersen Fox. In Fisher’s view, those are just conventional skyscrapers with a slightly different shape. His tower takes on a variety of shapes. When the floors rotate, the tower begins to undulate, and it can look a little like a fourteen-hundred-foot-tall belly dancer.

“I believe that everything should be adjustable to life,” Fisher said at breakfast a couple of days before the press conference. “What is right for today may not be right for tomorrow.” He turned on a laptop to show a video. To the music from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the narrator intoned, “For the first time, Man will have a building in four dimensions.”

At the Plaza, Fisher was introduced by Parker Ladd, the former publishing executive. First, a violinist appeared and played some Vivaldi. Then the “2001” theme swelled, and you half expected the architect to emerge from a puff of smoke. Instead, Ladd approached the lectern and said, “Esteemed guests, I now present Dr. David Fisher.”

Fisher, who has wavy gray hair and was wearing an elegant suit, began by explaining the origins of his design. “Everything started really in New York City, about four blocks from here on Fifth and Fifty-first, the Olympic Tower,” he said. Fisher was visiting a friend, and she said to him, “David, did you notice? You can see from here the East River and the Hudson River.” He went back to Florence and began to think. He realized that, if every floor could spin, everyone in an apartment tower would have the mixture of views similar to his friend’s. Then, to make his building more environmentally sensitive, he left a few feet of space between each floor and put wind turbines there. “The building is completely self-powered,” he said. Fisher, whose finished projects have included a prefabricated bathroom unit for hotel rooms, plans to make the apartment units in a factory, have them transported to the site, and then lifted up and attached to a central concrete cylinder that would contain elevators and stairs.

A reporter asked Fisher how the plumbing would work, since all the bathrooms and kitchens are within the rotating part of the building. “You have started with the most difficult question,” he said, and explained a scheme in which plumbing within each apartment could attach via flexible pipes to the building’s central core at various points as they moved around the circle.

Fisher said that he plans to build the first of his rotating towers in Dubai and the second in Moscow, and that he would like to build a third in New York. Factory production for the Dubai building, he said, would start this summer, and the project would cost roughly seven hundred million dollars. The project is a joint venture between a British company called the Dynamic Architecture Group and a Dubai real-estate company that is connected to the royal family.

Fisher conceded that he had never designed a skyscraper before. But that was just as well. If he had, he said, he “would not have come up with the idea—what you Americans call ‘out of the box.’ ” ♦

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